Welcome to pysofa’s documentation page !

pysofa is a Python module for accessing International Astronomical Union‘s SOFA library from python. SOFA (Standards of Fundamental Astronomy) is a set of algorithms and procedures that implement standard models used in fundamental astronomy.

pysofa is not a port of SOFA routines but a wrapper around the library. Thus, no calculations are made into the pysofa software, they are all delegated to the underlying SOFA library.

Disclaimer

pysofa is neither distributed, supported nor endorsed by the International Astronomical Union. In addition to pysofa‘s license, any use of this module should comply with SOFA’s license and terms of use. Especially, but not exclusively, any published work or commercial products which includes results achieved by using pysofa shall acknowledge that the SOFA software was used in obtaining those results.

Installation

Requirements

Before doing anything useful with pysofa, you’ll need:

  • Python 2.5 or higher.
  • numpy
  • and, obviously, the C version of the SOFA library.

Note

pysofa use ctypes to do its job, hence, the SOFA C library must be compiled as a shared library and findable by the operating system’s dynamic loader. Note that the default makefile provided with SOFA compile the library as a static one on UNIX systems.

Install

Once you have the requirements satisfied, you have a few options for installlation.

If you have easy_install/setuptools or pip installed, just do:

pip install pysofa

or:

easy_install pysofa

If you are installing from source code, do:

python ./setup.py install

Bug reports

The best place to report bugs or request features is the google code bug tracker.

Documentation

Warning

pysofa is still beta software and, although fully functionnal, class, method names and calling conventions are subject to change in future versions.

Please refer to the Reference page for in-depth view of pysofa‘s functions.

Indices and tables

Table Of Contents

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Reference

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